I was asked to edit a festival event and when the shooters gave me their footage, I just assumed I could edit it. They gave me an external hard drive and the original tapes...the files on the hard drive were created using Final Cut Pro. I knew it was Quitktime, but I edit Quicktime files all day long with no trouble. This was shot in HD and not only can I not edit the files, they won't even play on my system. I have the original tapes but there is a proprietary barrier between my (Sony/Canon) setup and the (JVC) camera it was shot with. Double whammy!

When I attempt to import these files into Premiere, it says I'm missing a codec. I've looked all over for a fix and can't find anything. I did find something called a Raylight Decoder but I am running Vista and that seems to be an issue too. I have a VLC Media Player but that offers no solution to my editing situation. I sure could use some help here...

Just a guess, but it sounds like the FCP Capture used the ProRes QT COCEC. This is not currently available for the PC, to the best of my knowledge.

Now, if I read the reports of the upcoming CS4 4.1 update, it will be able to handle more of the Mac QT files (though I do not know about ProRes) much, much better. Here's a pretty long THREAD that might make mention of the QT suff.